Been reading Konkin's book on agorism, a variant of anarcho-capitalism which explicitly includes an incremental path to get from here to there. Quite interesting. On the one hand, it's good that it has a path, and I totally agree with their dissing of other paths like the Libertarian Party, on the other hand, their proposed path is equally impossible. Still, given how small this thought space is (radical libertarian activism) the book is well worth reading.

If I get the time I will write up a more detailed review.

I think I have a decent number of ancap readers, so let me mention that I've just discovered the Center for A Stateless Society, a project of the Molinari Institute "dedicated to building public awareness of, and support for, market anarchism. We aim to accomplish this through providing news commentary and analysis from our unique perspective, serving as a market anarchist media center, beginning October 2006."

C4SS is directed by Brad Spangler, and mutualist Kevin Carson is the main research fellow. Their Facebook group has a lot less members than TSI's, so here I am providing them some needed promotion :).

They are currently engaged in a fundraising drive. (Yep, now that I'm in the non-profit sector I'm going to constantly be pestering y'all to give away your money. Let me know if it gets too annoying. I assure you that I donate to all the causes I promote).

Unless they are monopolies on who gets to point guns at people.

Monopolies are bad...unless it's something really important. Then we have to have a monopoly.

Monopolies are bad...except for monopolies on who is allowed to tell me what medicines are safe.

I don't get you people. Why do these views make any sense? How can you not have cognitive dissonance just forming these thoughts?

If you really think a monopolistic government is good...you must never again criticize any other business for being a monopoly. Mkay? (You can criticize it for working poorly - but you must not blame it's working poorly on lack of competition, since you think that lack of competition is appropriate to apply to the most important functions of society).

p.s. this post is not meant to be taken seriously. it is a reflection of my emotional beliefs and reactions, not my more nuanced cognitive position. I have added a "troll" tag to mark this, even though the goal is not "to provoke response", but rather "to express how I feel emotionally about the topic".

I'm reading Francoise Tremblay's market anarchist book "But who will build the roads?". (Here's a review). I'm finding it a bit philosophical for my taste so far, but since the first section is about a philosophical refutation of the State, hopefully others will be more interesting to me.

Anyway, while I'm not a big fan of philosophical arguments, and I'm much more into ancap as a practical method of getting efficient government, I do find the philosophical basis of anarchism quite appealing.

Put simply, it is the idea that anything which is wrong for a person to do, is also wrong for a group to do. This seems very simple and straightforward to me - it is the moral quality of "universality". It is the claim that there is no magic smoke in a group. Yet it puts one squarely on the path to anarchy, for it implies:

If it is wrong for a person to steal, it is wrong for a group to steal, even if you call it "taxes". If it is wrong for a person to kill, it is wrong for a group to kill, even if you give them fancy uniforms and call them an army. If it is wrong for you to tell me what plants I can grow and smoke, it is wrong for the DEA to do the same. To argue against anarchy is to argue for rule by the mob or by the gang. That some special group of people (the police, the army, the courts) gets special rights over the rest of us.

This is a perfectly defensible position, and you are welcome to hold it. I am not one to claim that the moral principles I find attractive must universally apply to everyone. But I think this point makes a nice antidote to naive conceptions of anarcho-capitalism as being a philosophy based on selfishness, greed, hatred of collective action, disbelief in market failures, etc.

(Actually, I should point out that while this single idea gets you to anarchism, it must be combined with a belief in property rights to get you to anarcho-capitalism. If you believe that poor people can steal from rich people, or that no one ever really owns anything, then you can be an anarchist w/o being an anarcho-capitalist.)

And Then There Were None - anarchist short fiction by Eric Frank Russell.

Based on the comments to the last post, I wanted to clarify my stance a bit. My position is rooted in my dissatisfaction with the performance of democracy as a system for organizing society. There are a couple points of view that I think many find intuitive that I am arguing against:

* Democracy is Just in a deep moral way that other systems aren't. To give each person a vote is to make them a full participant in the system, and thus make that system moral, no matter what results come out of it. (I certainly think that giving people votes is better than monarchy, but I find this argument rather mystical, and anti-pragmatic. Consequences matter, and if voting gives bad results, I think most people would prefer better results). This mystical viewpoint comes up when people say things like "You didn't vote, so you don't get to complain", or when they are happy about increased voter turnout, despite the fact that it goes hand in hand with increased voter ignorance (marginal voters are the least educated about the issues, of course).
* Democracy is the best we can do. There is nothing better. Often this flows from "I can't think of any better alternative". This assumption can subtly manifest itself as hopelessness, or as devaluing the problem because one doesn't believe a solution exists.

I am not saying I don't admire our founding fathers. As jamey1138 wrote in response to hubt's "I don't see any better alternatives", "Well, before Jefferson, neither had anyone else of his age. I think and hope that that's Patri's point-- our founders did a bang-up job. Now it's maybe time to try to out-do them."

Exactly! Let's keep in mind the historical context: there was a time when a broad democracy (male landowners was, for the time, a relatively broad swath of society) was a crazy, innovative idea. The founders of the USA looked beyond the political systems of their time, and came up with something new and better. That had an enormous positive effect on the world, and I think it's great.

But people, that was over two hundred years ago! Call me a techno-optimist, but I think even in a slow-moving area like political organization, over that long a time period, there are some new ideas worth trying[1]. Like, maybe we can take another quantum leap to better government. It's been done before, after all.

That's all I want people to buy into. I mean, I have my own ideas about specific solutions[2], including some I'm personally invested in[3], which is why I have an emotional attachment to dissing democracy, and to people's openness to alternatives. But it's fine with me if you don't buy my solutions. I just want you to buy the general idea that social organization is a technology, it's a very important technology, and our current version is ancient and works poorly in many deep, consistent ways. It has been brilliantly characterized as the least awful form of political organization. That suggests that it can probably be improved, and that doing so would be an enormous win for the world.

If you are into philosophy and math (rare in the world, but common among my readers, I think :) ), a very interesting treatise on the general topic of improving social organization is Ken Binmore's virtually unknown "Game Theory and the Social Contract" (read both volumes). It's long, and math-ey, and philosophy-ey, and not at all libertarian (the author identifies as a Whig, and seems fairly left-wing to me), but I love it's perspective on this whole area of designing better social systems, which I think is crucially important and much neglected.

[1] Well, I guess you could classify Communism as such a trial, and it was a disaster. Let's start with smaller groups this time. Much smaller.

[2] Anarcho-capitalism is the one I favor with the most thought behind it. It's a weird, non-intuitive, subtle system, which some very smart people think would be a big improvement, so I highly recommend that you not dismiss it unless you have taken the time to really understand why it is different. As a start, I recommend reading Machinery of Freedom for the theory, or at least Anarchy and Efficient Law, and The Enterprise of Law for historical context. Here is a set of links to further historical reading.

[3] See my reply to krizazy for how seasteading fits in.

heh:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 19, 2008

An anarcho-capitalist entrepreneur has launched a new business venture that will use deterrence to secure libertarian tax havens against government aggression. The company claims an effective defense system has been the missing link in previous attempts by libertarian secessionists to become independent, and that its services can fulfill that hitherto unmet need.

OKLAHOMA CITY – Local entrepreneur Nick Lunsford has announced the formation of a startup firm to be incorporated in the Cayman Islands as Acme Private Defense Company. It will specialize in defending libertarian separatist tax havens against government aggression. The acronym "ACME" stands for "Anarcho-Capitalist Military Enterprises."

Photo caption: "Acme's trained retaliation specialists are eager to help safeguard your libertarian separatist tax haven's independence."

I wish them the best of luck, but I think staying and fighting is a futile option. (worse than staying and not fighting, for example). Sure, guerilla warfare may be able to make up some disparity of force - but not the insanely high disparity of force that exists between individuals and the US government.

consider how ineffective an economic market would be if it were organised in a similar way. A comparable economic market would be one in which there were only two possible producers of goods and services. Each possible producer would develop a package of all the goods and services that each citizen would have over a three or four year period. Citizens would then choose which package would actually be implemented by voting for the producer of their choice. They could not pick and choose goods and services out of each package. They could have only one package, in its entirety. Such a system would obviously be far inferior to our current economic markets. Our present democratic systems of governance share all the features that would make such an economic system incompetent at satisfying the needs of consumers.
(Evolution's Arrow)

An advantage of anarcho-capitalism over seasteading is that it does much more to make government like our economic system. Seasteading just gives you more choice of packages, and more incentive to make a good package, but still has rough granularity. It's key advantage is feasibility - I think it is possible to get from here to seasteading, but not to convert current governments to ancap. Seasteading may enable ancap, but it must come first.